A WHEEZE IS FAINTLY PERCEPTIBLE by the time the Golden Boys of Hong Kong's Mountain Rescue Unit, with more than 100 years of service between them, reach Shek O headland. As members cast climbing ropes off a 15-metre precipice and anchor the other end to a rock in preparation for cliff-rescue training, the four leaders map out the day's strategy. It's a 30-year reunion on the rocks: Luk Cheung-chuen, or CC, has rejoined comrades he worked with in the 1960s, having been recruited recently as company commander. His mission: revive morale that has disintegrated faster than the rotting granite on Lion Rock.
'I was born here,' says Luk, 52, who joined the unit in 1969, its inaugural year. 'Mountain Rescue brought me up, now I'm trying to bring up Mountain Rescue' - since last October when top brass of the Civil Aid Service (CAS) privately approached him in a move he called 'quite unusual'. 'A lot of people wanted the post,' he says. Mountain Rescue's 83 members are, after all, 'the cream of the CAS', a government-financed emergency-relief organisation that has 7,000 volunteers in 12 divisions. But, 'it may not be a pleasant job in the beginning,' Luk admits. 'We reached a peak at the Pat Sin Leng Range rescue,' he sighs, when the unit was heralded for its heroic efforts in the 1996 hill fire that killed five people. Combatting complacency, as he puts it, is of no small consequence: the unit carries out upwards of 50 rescues yearly that neither the police nor fire department are capable of handling, most commonly retrieving lost hikers at Sai Kung.
Hong Kong rescues have their quirks, owing to such factors as the city having one of the highest world rankings for mobile-phone penetration, outdoor recreation being a relatively new way to spend leisure time here and a spontaneous Chinese attitude that often fails to take preparation into account, says Francis Fong, a full-time operations and training officer.
This can translate into a scenario like the one some years ago when two twentysomething men ventured into Pat Sin Leng country park. The temperature was above 30 degrees Celsius as they rode their bicycles, without water. Soon lost and dehydrated, they creatively solved their fix: they shouldered their bikes and climbed the nearest peak until their mobile phones were able to pick up a signal in the remote location. Chopper to the rescue. 'This is probably the easiest place in the world to get a helicopter ride,' Fong laments.
Sometimes, the humour works in reverse. In 1994, a climber and his girlfriend, planning to spend the night on a ledge two-thirds of the way up Lion Rock, were sipping hot chocolate at 2am when the rescuing abseilers descended on them. 'We were perfectly all right but they insisted on 'rescuing' us, anyway,' climber Paul Briggs was quoted as saying. A nearby resident mistook the couple's candlelight for a distress signal and notified the unit, which must treat all rescues with gravitas, Fong explains.
Emancipation from nature, however, requires manpower, and for Luk, May and June are recruitment months. The glamorous ads on TV of crack commandos abseiling from helicopters, however, aren't quite cutting it. 'Kids don't want to join,' he moans, noting 'an obvious trend' among youth culture towards self-expression and rebellion, not uniforms and teamwork - for nominal pay - in the name of civic duty.
It's an attitude Luk might have a hard time relating to, having been a civil servant all his life. Apart from a permanent staff post with Mountain Rescue, his only other paying job has been in the Lands Department, where he's currently a chief land executive. Luk, in fact, was weaned on spit-shines and spot inspections, having first worn a crew cut at age 16, when he joined the Red Cross. In a city with little history of its own armed forces, he's perhaps Hong Kong's closest version of a career military man.